On the final leg of my trip home last night – a flight from Dallas to St. Louis – I sat next to a U.S. Army soldier, in full fatigues, who was on his own journey home after a six-month tour in Iraq. He appeared to be around my age, early 40’s, so I struck up a conversation, asking if he was headed to Ft. Leonard Wood. He said he was.
I then made a passing comment about the Commander in Chief’s plan to soon announce a new strategy for the war – which led to a brief discussion about the nature of news coverage of the war; about how our papers, magazines, blogs, TV and radio stations depict one reality, while the reality on the ground, according to this soldier, is much different. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask him to.
Instead, I said I found it interesting that the collective opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been widely reported as outright opposition to one last surge, when the JCS’ position has actually been and remains conditional, i.e., a surge is a bad idea if it’s not part of a larger plan with better-defined goals. The soldier smiled, nodded, and said something to the effect of, “Yeah, it’s a sound-bite world.�
We then talked briefly about how long he expected to be back in the States: 18 months, minimum, long enough for his son, a high school senior, and daughter, a high school junior, to graduate and go on to college or whatever might come next.
We were silent for the remainder of the flight, each absorbed in our own distractions. After we landed, while the plane taxied to the gate, we resumed talking, and he mentioned how much he appreciated the support of the American people; how he and his friends frequently received “care packagesâ€? with treats from people they didn’t even know, while soldiers from other countries, including Britain, often received nothing and were thus resigned to watching in awe and envy as the U.S. soldiers opened their bounty … and then shared it with the group.
Off the plane, walking away from the gate and each other, I retraced the steps of our conversation.
Though he had never committed to a position either way on the President’s presumed “surge strategy,� this soldier’s combined remarks – brief and friendly as they were, decisive but never harsh – echoed the unspoken message, the silent admonition that I sense whenever I talk about these matters with my nephew, the former Marine who served in Afghanistan, shortly after 9/11, namely: Civilians who sit in the isolated solace of comfortable lives, spitting out stark, black-and-white opinions on what should and shouldn’t be done in Iraq, despite the fact that few of them have ever lived in a war zone or engaged in a firefight for their lives – those civilians should re-learn the value, the honor, of discretion.
If you’re one of those civilians and this suggestion angers you, direct your anger to me, not to the soldier with whom I shared a flight home or to my former-Marine nephew. This rant is, after all, my interpretation of what they may be thinking but have not actually said and probably will never say. They are far too dignified, and far too appreciative of their civilian counterparts, to utter such words. In fact, if pushed, they’d probably defer to our freedom of speech, to say whatever we like, informed or not, which is after all a freedom they are fighting and dying to protect.
Accordingly, I will likewise defer to that freedom and limit my request to this one: Tonight and tomorrow, as you evaluate the President’s plan and the responses of Congressional leaders, think twice before you react, especially if you have no first-hand experience in the Middle East, the wars that plague it, and the cultures that define it. If your opinions are based on second-hand knowledge, admit it, early and often, and respectfully drop the pretense that you can lay any claim to certainty on this or related matters. To do otherwise is to be guilty of the same level of fanatical fundamentalism that we so often criticize in others.
[Cross-posted at Central Sanity.]